White Ash on Bone: A Zombie Novel (10 page)

Rex hung out of her Mom's bedroom window waving at the car.  He held her father’s shotgun in his other hand.

Ginger pulled the car into the yard below the window to the protective cover of the gun and got out.

"Ginger," Rex said, "I don’t know if you know what's-" he stopped mid-sentence when he saw his mother-in-law get out of the car.  Rex didn’t see his father-in-law and filled in the blanks without asking any questions.

"I’ll be right down, don’t move," Rex said as he disappeared from the window.

From the outside, they could see him come halfway down the steps through the window in front of the stairs.  He then jumped over to the side of the stair rail and went out of view.  A moment later, Rex opened the door, gun at the ready, wearing only pineapple-covered swimming trunks.

"They came at me when I was in the hot-tub.” he said. “I killed one out back then they followed me in the house. There's a few bodies behind the door here, so don’t be alarmed when you see them.  You have to shoot them in the head or they don’t want to die... or stay dead," he explained.

Rex handed his mother-in-law the shotgun and turned back toward the bodies.  He grabbed on to the legs of the first body dragged the bodies out of the house one at a time.  The corpses left a smear of red on the hardwood floor.  Everyone watched in silence and kept an eye out for more zombies.

He waved for everyone to move close to him, "We’re going to stick together and move as a group.  Let’s keep as quiet as possible and not panic."

Rex led the way down the stone pathway that curved around the side of the house to the garage.  He paused at the corner and peered out into the night while willing his eyes to cut past the edges of darkness. 

"The garage is all metal and block with steel fire doors," He said.  "We can hold up there till the morning. Hopefully by then, we’ll have a plan and perhaps know what the hell is going on."

He thought about his options.  When they moved to Pennsylvania, they moved in with the in-laws temporarily.  The majority of their property sat at the far end of the driveway in a white storage pod.  Among the pods inventory were several of Rex's guns and a decent cache of ammo.  He also thought about his in-laws brand new all black Dodge Ram mega-cab.  Rex had a vision about driving over the undead and laughing.

Ten minutes later, the group watched the garage door rattle closed while they sat safely inside the pickup in the garage.

Rex and Alison had collected all his guns and ammo from the storage pod.  The guns included one AK-47, a Chinese made SKS, 2 Springfield Armory .40 cal XDs, a twelve-gauge shotgun, and a .308 “deer” rifle.  He also managed to retrieve his .45 from the back of the house. The rest of the girls had moved the truck into the garage and collected food from the house.  Ginger also managed to get her husband some better looking clothes to put on.

Ginger flipped on the radio while the other girls tried to get a cell phone signal.  Throughout the night, they exchanged stories and listened to intermittent emergency radio broadcasts.

Chapter Six

In Pittsburgh, three nurses rushed into Malone's room with a crash cart. Alarms screamed out the dead man's condition.  The bed stood empty, but a trail of lead wires guided their eyes to the standing figure of Malone who grabbed the closest nurse and pulled the man close. 

"Restrain him," the male nurse ordered the others. 

Malone's face sunk into the man's shoulder.

"Fuck!" the nurse screamed.  "Get him off me."

Malone and the man fell to the floor while the other two nurses tried to pull Malone's dead weight off him. 

Malone pressed in on his victim taking bits of flesh in his mouth every time he could get his face close enough.  In the tussle, someone kicked the crash cart, and it wheeled back out into the hallway.

One by one they stopped fighting Malone as life ebbed from their bodies.  Malone picked himself off the floor and left the room.  He walked down the hallway and out of the wing.  The level of the hospital that Malone had been admitted to housed a bridge that connected to the parking garage across the street.  The glass doors obliged Malone's advance by sliding open at his approach, and he shuffled out through them.

Back in Malone's room, the lifeless medical staff picked themselves off the reddened floor and wandered back into the hallway.  In the abstract, they went back to work.  They rounded on the hundred or so other patients on the floor that were under their care.

In the parking garage, Malone rounded a structural pier, and ran into a middle-aged woman carrying several helium balloons.  The woman threw her hands out at the naked Malone and somehow the balloons became wrapped around Malone's neck.

This was all happening in front of a security camera, but no one was watching at the moment.  Security was responding to what they thought was some kind of riot from gang-bangers on the third floor.

Malone lost interest in the woman fairly soon.  She had a heart condition and gave out to cardiac arrest after just a couple of moments of being eaten.  Her last thought as light vanished from her eyes was that she thought she was being raped.

Malone left her and continued on.  His naked form dressed only in the balloons strung, around his neck reading, "It's A Boy!"

On the bottom floor of the garage, Malone found the parking-lot attendant sitting in a tollbooth.  The Hispanic attendant was sitting on a stool and reading the sports page.  He listened to some kind of salsa music on his iPod.

Malone's feet tripped on the curb in front of the open door to the booth and fell into the booth in front of the attendant. 

The balloons wacked into the attendant's paper, and he found himself face to face with, "It's A Boy!"

On the floor, Malone grabbed the man's ankle and bit with his teeth.

The attendant jerked from the pain and fell over backwards off the stool.  His head cracked into the back of the booth dazing his vision. 

In life, Malone was one of the rare birds who never enjoyed Mexican cuisine.  In his undead state, he didn’t mind it one bit.

Malone crawled on top of the dazed attendant who continued to try and free himself. 

The attendant strained to push Malone off him, but lacked the strength to break the larger man's weight.  Death pressed back down on him.  Fear turned to desperation, then exhaustion. 

The zombie paid no attention to the despair and shock that set in on his victim's face.

Malone finished his job in the booth and moved on.  He walked out of the parking garage into the afternoon light in the city.  Pittsburgh had thousands of people that Malone wanted to meet. 

Back in the Hospital, the plague of the dead spread from floor to floor.  Hospital Security succumbed to the undead before they could call for help from the police.  A number of people managed to call for help, but the delay added numbers to the growing collection of undead near the heart of Oakland in Pittsburgh.

Several waves of officers succumbed before emergency services hit the complete panic button.  At that point, shit was spilling over into the streets.  

Some people managed to barricade themselves into sections of the hospital while others fled.  The wounded who managed to escape headed to other hospitals or home where they would die within hours and reanimate as the undead.

###

Sulla and his ad-hoc militia waited at the bridge.  Two sets of double-stacked jersey barriers divided the bridge into sections.  Sulla figured they had to hold the zombies at the bridge at all costs.  The first barrier would slow the zombies down. This would hopefully allow the defenders to take a few extra cracks at a headshot. If the zombies managed to make it to the second barrier thirty yards distant, it was time to fall back up to the top of the hill to a barrier currently under construction.  Several cars were positioned to light up the kill zones when darkness approached. 

The pickups that Sulla sent out with snipers had done hearty work on the dead, but the distance to the bridge had closed.  The men scrambled out of their trucks and over the barriers to make it to the safety of the militia lines.  A quarter of a mile behind them thousands of undead followed in their wake.

"Listen up!" Sulla said, "No one fires until they are close enough to get a clean shot on the head."  The men lined up in a straight line along the southern barrier and checked their guns. 

Peggy Davil's cameraman, Fred, had elected to stay behind and provide a live feed to the news channel in Pittsburgh.  It took awhile, but the affiliate channel had convinced the parent network the footage was real.  Fred's camera feed now fed into millions of homes around the world.

The leading zombie was a young teenage girl; she lacked a jaw. 

"Baby," a militia man stuttered.  "That’s my baby girl." 

Sulla recognized the grief-stricken man.  He had lost everyone in his family last year in a house fire, everyone but his daughter. The local newspaper had done several articles about it at the time, and the community had been heartbroken.

It was too much for the father to handle.  He moved to the edge of the bridge without saying another word. He raised a pistol to his head, and pulled the trigger.  His body fell over the side of the bridge. For a moment, everyone was stunned.  Sulla could picture the man still standing there, but he was gone.

"Here they come!" someone shouted.

The militia of some sixty men refocused their attention on the undead.  The riflemen opened fire all along the line and several zombies fell.

Kayla, the girl’s name is Kayla, Sulla thought.  All around the girl zombies fell, but she continued.  Bullets flew all around her, but it was as if no one had the heart to end it.  She was the last surviving member of her family.  She was dead but somehow not.

Sulla raised his gun and directed the sights to the girl's head, but someone shot her before he could pull the trigger.  The old sniper put his hand on Sulla's shoulder.

"Some things you don’t want on your conscience," the sniper said.

The militia fired non-stop and dozens of zombies dropped in front of them.  The zombies stacked up behind the first barrier and got pressed against it from the growing mass behind them.  Several that were shot in the head remained erect because there was no room to fall.

The undead flailed out with their arms and struggled against the press.  Here and there, they would fall over the barrier and be taken out by militia bullets. 

In a few places, zombies pulled themselves on top of their brethren and tried to crawl forward.

The bodies stacked on top of each other as the militia brought them to their end, again.  The first barricade could no longer be seen.  It was buried under a mass of dead bodies.  The zombies crawled over the growing mound and pressed forward.  The pile rolled forward and looked like it came alive like a slow moving blob.

Sulla realized that they couldn’t hold the barricade; there were too many zombies coming down the road.  The defenders would either run out of ammunition, or be plain over run by the horde if they continued their current defense.  It was time for plan B.  Sulla keyed his radio.

"Bring the trucks and tankers up; it’s time to move everyone back," Sulla said.

Two eighteen-wheelers carrying gasoline rumbled on to the bridge and stopped just behind the defenders.  Everyone understood a bomb had just been parked up their ass, and no one lacked motivation to retreat south down the highway.

Sulla and a couple of the sniper's stayed at the front of the rigs to cover the drivers long enough for everyone to make it to a vehicle and get up the hill behind them.  The zombies were now coming over the second barricade on the bridge, feet away from Sulla.  He did the sensible thing and ran for his life to a waiting truck while the dead reached out behind him.

Halfway up the hill, the truck stopped, and everyone with a gun took aim at the tanker trucks.  Everyone was scared as hell, but no one wanted to miss out on an opportunity to blow up a fuel truck.

The first shot cracked out and found its mark.  It started the chain reaction that caused liquid fuel to rapidly turn into an expanding fireball.  The sky lit up.  The tank burst open and engulfed the other tanker which was being pushed on its side when it too exploded.  The twin shockwave pushed out in every direction.  The middle span of the bridge collapsed, and everything within a hundred yards was engulfed in flames.  The shockwave reached up the hill and knocked Sulla out of the bed of the truck to the ground.  The windows of the vehicle shattered from the blast and scattered all over the road.

Sulla turned over on the ground to find the camera guy, Fred, beside him.  His camera was knocked loose and lay broken on the ground.

Up
the hill, Sulla's men cheered while they took their positions at the last barricade.

###

Anderson took a deep breath and kicked in the door to the stair well.  Two of his troopers rushed into the well and instantly opened fire.  Anderson rushed in behind them and saw one of the troopers locked up with a zombie.  Anderson brought the butt of his rifle crashing into the skull of the creature, and it went slack.  The trooper pushed it to the ground and stomped the head in with his boot.  Shots rang out as other soldiers continued down the stairwell. 

From the floor above them, the door burst open.  Anderson looked up to see a handful of survivors taking the opportunity to flee with the soldiers.